


The Phantoms of Ourselves

by AbandonedWorld



Series: hope is just a stranger wondering how it got so bad [4]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Cold Weather, Emotional, Explicit Language, M/M, Pic-fic, Post-Movie, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-10-04
Updated: 2011-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-24 07:23:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AbandonedWorld/pseuds/AbandonedWorld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of unrelated stories from Charles and Erik's perspectives. Using pictures as the basis, these "pic-fics" explore their relationship both pre and post beach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Embedded

**Author's Note:**

> Multiple chapters, all in one way or the other related to the movie, or each other, but can be read out of order or skipped through!

**Embedded**  
 **Title** : Embedded  
 **Author** : [](http://abandonedworld.livejournal.com/profile)[**abandonedworld**](http://abandonedworld.livejournal.com/)    
 **Rating** : PG-13  
 **Word Count** : 348  
 **Characters** : Charles/Erik  
 **Summary** : Quick one-shot "pic-fic" that came from the two images posted below. Erik misses Charles, and the same can be said of the other.  
 **Disclaimer** : I own nothing, yada yada. I also do **not** own these pictures. Found all over tumblr, as I'm sure everyone knows!   
 **Author's Note** : Had angst-y fun with this one. Seeing as I am no artist, I used pictures of James McAvoy & Michael Fassbender to the best of my advantage and bam, a little ficlet was born! 

  
[](http://pics.livejournal.com/abandonedworld/pic/0002d1f5/)  [](http://pics.livejournal.com/abandonedworld/pic/0002ews6/)

Erik stands on the plateau of the small dock, silently watching as icy waves lapp jarringly at the heels of the sodden wood. Years and years have passed since he's been here, right here in this spot, contemplating the simpler days of his youth. 

 _ _Contemplating Charles. A sadness fills him, but only for the regret he knows that's been haunting him well all this time. Regret that haunts him still. A bottled voice calling his name, over and time again echoes inside of his war-torn mind. Erik hates his name when it's heard in Xavier's notable accent, missing those lips that spoke so gently, so confidently at him. His body writhes momentarily and waits for the chill to pass through. He understands what's happening – what's happened during this lost time – but lays the blame of those shivers that corrupt his own spine, on the winter air that rolls atop the crests of those quiet waves. It drifts into him, it drifts out of him.__

 _'Charles, oh Charles. How different this could all be.'_ A mantra he's sealed into himself to stave the pain that never lay so absent from the surface of his mind.

His arms go numb as they rest on the prickly concrete, offset by round pebbles that are embedded there. Forever unmoving, unchanging at their core. His elbows feel but he doesn't feel anything but the emotional torment of right now. 

"Charles, my old friend," he lets slip, and Erik stares out, his words becoming as smooth as the silky black water stretched out endlessly before him. 

xxx

Charles wakes to the sound of his name. Of blue and black waves pooling down around two feet he can no longer feel. A sensory he hasn't felt in a great long while. 

A presence is there, one familiar and dark. An old friend, a new enemy. A forgotten foe. A wanted ally. 

"Erik."

Charles says the name knowing it's heard, and shifts his upper body as best he can, given the circumstances.

Life is hard without his legs, yet it's been much harder without Erik. 

  


  


  



	2. Frozen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik leaves now he and Charles are left dealing with the solitude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, pictures found all about the internet. Thanks internet, Ily.

[   
](http://s54.photobucket.com/albums/g111/8SMALLFAN8/?action=view&current=PicFic2.jpg)

The color brilliance of his ocean-blue eyes faded _just_ a touch as they scanned Erik's thick, black handwriting; words of "Goodbye" and "I'm sorry" scrawled across a sheet of tattered paper that'd been left for them. Placed on the table beside his bed- _their_ bed. His all-knowing orbs hadn't been fortunate enough to have seen a future vision of what had just happened, something routinely offered by his powerful brain, and it left him speechless now. Hurt.

Shattering.

Charles crumpled the hastily written note and pressed it against his burning forehead. He wanted those sentences to infect his mind — wanted to relive his failures that somehow, somewhere along the lines he and Erik crossed, had perhaps gone one step too far. Or had gotten too close. He wanted to die from this ugly, unknown virus as it traced and traveled its way through the tiny wires that keep him alive, but he didn't allow for it. And wouldn't. Charles needed a suffocation to all this pain but unknowingly became the goodbye that Erik had left behind. He knew – no, felt it then.

How _could_ he resent life, though? He had the school. He had the children. He had _purpose_.

But he negated and let himself go in that moment, let his fingers slice themselves on the edges of that scorned paper and waited for the acrid smell of blood to rise into him, as he remained motionless. As he remained deadened from the waist down.

Charles realized that was the trouble all along. Yet, it wasn't _his_ fault. Really, it wasn't. If only he could have said it more, spoke of it more, done something more openly about it...maybe then...But no. Erik was still gone from him now.

His eyes couldn't bare the truth any longer. The exhausted, blackened lids closed tightly, more tight than his hand as it clasped the letter, and his mind searched outwardly for the magnetism he so longed for.

Charles only felt an emptiness too frozen to name. To paralyzed and gone to feel any more.

"Erik."

 

\+ + +

 

Erik sat along the smooth, soft edging of his hotel mattress. His pants were lying on the floor, discarded and filthy from the perilous journey that found him here. He had refused all transportation once he left Xavier...'s home. A laborious punishment to fit the crime, or so he justified.

He only wore a white t-shirt now — one of Charles's, purposely taken as a token, of what, he wasn't sure. His back was finely tuned but the muscles there were aching and pulled from his torturous, cheap goodbye.

His legs now supported the weight of his arms and pointed elbows, but everything was so tired, so torn from abandonment and abuse. Self-inflicted harm against the limbs that could still _feel_ , in honor of the ones Charles was forced to now live without.

Erik wasn't entirely sure he knew why he had stayed after that crippling event on the beach. It would have been easier to have left back then, at that moment when exodus seemed more plausible – more feasible than now. The truth was, he had single handedly changed everything — with everyone. Yet he went back and remained with Charles.

Erik stayed by Charles' side through those morphine-induced nights, those weak, slow-going days; watched as the telepath recovered and then cracked beneath the gravity of his new life.

He hadn't left Xavier during the worst of those days – and knew then that he couldn't – but once all began to settle, the consequence of his anger...of what he'd done, well, had crushed him.

And so he packed. And he wrote Charles a letter in the early morning hours of dawn. And he watched as the man slept, remembering the pattens of his breathing chest, in-out, in...out. And then he left.

He was gone. So far gone now.

And so every night since his leaving, he sits alone in that white-cotton shirt, stares through the minute spacing of his blinds and whispers, "Charles, I'm so sorry."

Through all his faults, he's not entirely sure which it is intended for.


	3. Naked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tiny blurb from Erik's point of view, ie. he's missing Charles. Continuing on in the independent "pic-fics" of this story!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Michael's beautiful picture was found, like the others, on Tumblr. I own nothing, obviously.

[   
](http://s54.photobucket.com/albums/g111/8SMALLFAN8/?action=view&current=photo2.jpg)

xxx

Naked and alone. Alone and... _why am I unable to forget you?_

I’m standing here, naked but half dressed, the bathroom holding my confused and forlorn person. I have this ache. I hold this forbidden hope. For you, always for you, Xavier. I wanted...but no, I couldn’t have. I felt but...no, could I have?

My shoulders. You always spoke of my strength and the weights I bore as though it were a choice, but I knew better. I wear your absence now, cold and so far away. I wear it and I hate it. I despise that you’re so far away from me. Or I you.

I wanted so mu-...did _you?_ I needed an openness, and you desired the same from me, but how could I haven shown you the man I am inside. But. Fuck, you knew it already. I feel...macabre, dangerous. I don’t trust the lack of trust I have in myself now. In my mind. If only you were there to keep me constant...or company. A steadiness I miss as though the wind were being taken from inside my lungs.

Charles, I never told you this, never thought I could. How could I have? You knew already. You always knew everything already. I never told you how much I...

I...my eyes swim as though a maelstrom lies there, behind them. My voice echoes from the back of my throat as words slip past. Words I wasn't all to sure I wanted to hear aloud.

 _"I never told you this...but I..."_

A knock on my door, disrupting me from these thoughts. I see a dark-haired girl drop her head in through a reflection of the mirror that hangs just in front of me. She's there with purpose and responsibility – a hint of worry marking her defined features.

"Sir, it's time to go." Stuttering, she orders me to order them.

I respond by nodding, my mind resolutely accepting the day's pending mission.

 _Charles_ I think, wondering what it was I was about to remember. Something I had never-"Sir?"

I slip a black top over my torso, feeling the weightless cotton against my roughened skin; I know there's no time for thoughts of Xavier or what could have been. I know this.

You see, I have this ache.

**Author's Note:**

> Postmortem deleted. Though, feedback is always wanted! x


End file.
